Please pay attention as this chapter has some dark themes; your well-being comes first.
TW: Graphic description of violence and injuries, Genocide, Implied Child Death, War Crimes, Burning Alive
.·:·.✧ ✦ ✧.·:·.
November 1599, Kyoto, Gojo clan estate
"You should've seen her face," Seijiro was saying, the corner of his mouth lifted into his usual easy, careless smirk. His hands moved as he spoke, sketching the memory into the air as if he could rebuild the scene piece by piece for the woman across from him. "We were halfway through the Kasagi woods when this curse burst out of the swamp. I thought it was something serious, used a Blue straight through its gut." He snapped his fingers outward, mimicking the implosion with a boom. "Butinstead of exorcising it cleanly, the damn thing detonated into a wave of mud. It washed us from head to toe. Both of us."
A chuckle escaped him.
Seijiro was seated cross-legged beside the futon, sleeves pushed up; he looked relaxed in the way people only looked when they were trying very hard to appear so. He wore nothing of the war grime that had become a bad habit in Iga, on the war front. His black hakama was folded neatly under him, his kosode slightly wrinkled but clean, his white haori discarded earlier, lying nearby.
"She didn't even yell at me at first," he went on lightly. "Just stared, completely drenched. She looked like a drowned cat, with her hair plastered to her face like that. Of course I told her so, and she went furious." His grin sharpened. "Then she spent the next hour cursing me out."
A laugh broke through the room. It was light and girlish. The woman before him laughed as though she were younger than him because in her mind, she was, as if the years between now and twenty-five years ago had never existed. She lifted a trembling hand to cover her laughing mouth, silver strands of hair sliding across her faded green eyes. When she finally spoke, warmth filled her voice, but as always, it belonged to another time.
"Ah… Akiteru," she murmured fondly, brushing the tear of laughter from the corner of her eye. "You always were such a handful."
Seijiro did not flinch, did not blink. His smile remained exactly where it had been as the name passed over him like ash. Not Seijiro. Akiteru. Always Akiteru.
It did not matter how many times Payo insisted he had eyes like his mother; if one looked past the exhaustion, how, in the right light, green slid through the blue as if moss beneath ice. Atsuhime, for all her fragile gentleness, never truly looked at him as Seijiro, as her son. She always saw only the shadow of the man she had loved twenty-five years ago when looking at Seijiro. She saw only Akiteru.
The man she loved and the man Seijiro hated.
The man who had used him as nothing more than a piece on a political board, tugging at his strings with careful hands and no hesitation, without him ever really noticing in the way that mattered. The man who had shaped him into a weapon before he had even understood what a weapon was meant for. And worst of all—
The man who had forced his hand against Kaoru.
Seijiro exhaled quietly. There was no point correcting her anymore. The first few times it had happened, he had tried, carefully and gently. He had told her his name, reminded her who he was, her son. Each time had only made her more confused; then more frightened. Sometimes she had cried. Sometimes she had hit him and yelled in madness. Sometimes she had tried to kill him before trying to kill herself.
So he had simply stopped.
"Yeah," he said mildly. The words tasted bitter on their way out. "That sounds like me. A real messmaker." He studied her without letting the observation show.
Atsuhime. The Okugata-sama of the Gojo clan. Akiteru Gojo's great love. Seijiro's mother.
Despite her humble origins, she had been the most beautiful woman in Kyoto, the capital's celebrated blossom. Nobles used to travel half the country just to see her smile during the spring festivals. But that woman had been gone for years. The Atsuhime before him sat wrapped in a pale shawl with shoulders far too narrow beneath the silk. Her hair, once glossy, had gone fragile, and now only Payo still bothered to comb it properly. Her kimono was still clean because someone saw to that, but the elegance she once chose herself had disappeared, and no plum blossom perfume lingered in her sleeves. No paint touched her lips or her nails.
Still, she was beautiful; the kind of beauty that looked less like a person and more like a memory Akiteru had tried too hard to preserve.
She now lived her days in this room.
The brightest room in the entire compound, one overlooking an inner garden designed to bloom year-round. Camellias in winter, Irises in spring, maples burning red in autumn. Morning light indulged in that room longer than anywhere else in the estate. Akiteru had made sure of all of that; he had made sure everything around her was perfect, as though this one fragile woman was the last thing in the world he still loved and made him human.
Seijiro often wondered if that was really love or just guilt and possession in disguise.
Atsuhime hummed, fingers drifting over the embroidery of her wide sleeve. Today, she was lucid, or close enough. Seijiro always used those hours to pretend to speak with her. Not because she saw him clearly, because she didn't. Perhaps because she didn't ask anything of him, didn't accuse or strategize or offer condolences he could not bear.
Perhaps madness was easier than the world.
"It's a nice day for autumn," he said softly, rising to his feet. "Doesn't even feel like the first days of November."
He slid the shōji open toward the inner garden. Outside, the wind stirred the nanten shrubs along the engawa, and a sparrow hopped between stones. The air carried the scent of rain from the night before, mixed with the sweetness of camellias blooming further down the path.
It was a beautiful day. And yet, Seijiro had never felt colder. He breathed the air in anyway, and when he turned back, he found his mother watching him. Her eyes seemed clearer now, lucid enough to focus, but not enough to recognize.
Her head tilted slightly. "You're making that face again," she said fondly.
Seijiro feigned a scowl. "What face?"
"The one you make when you carry too much," she replied with a teasing smile on her lips. "Your eyebrows do that little slope." She hummed lightly. "Don't frown so much, Akiteru. You'll wrinkle early, and I won't have that."
A breath escaped him that almost passed for laughter. "I don't frown."
"You're frowning now."
Seijiro sighed. "Maybe."
"Are you worried about him again?" she asked lightly, picking at her sleeve. "Takahiro Zenin. Always so stubborn and proud and rude." Her smile turned teasing. "Is Zenin-dono giving you trouble again?"
Seijiro nearly laughed; even lost inside her own mind, she could still stumble frighteningly close to the truth. Zenin-dono. Well, not the same Zenin-dono she imagined, but indeed there was a Zenin-dono troubling him now.
"Yes," he said eventually. "Something like that."
He did not want to think about her. About Kaoru. But it was inevitable, and her name kept echoing in his thoughts. Seven days had passed since he withdrew the entire Gojo and Koga troops from the Iga front and returned to Kyoto. Seven days without word from the border. Not peace, Masanari Hattori was not the kind of man who suddenly developed mercy. No, he was just waiting like everyone else. Because the whispers had started.
Merchants first. Servants second. His own men in Kyoto last.
The Zenin head flying north on the back of a shikigami. The Eastern Army marching on the Tōkaidō. Nagoya-go burning. The skies above the Owari province black with ash and smoke.
That much was no longer a rumor.
Seijiro did not yet know the full story; he did not know what part his father had played in the destruction or the extent of it, or what part he himself had played in it, without meaning to. He did not want to imagine Kaoru's face if the rumors were true. If the fire really had taken everything, her clan, her ancestral home. Or worse—
His hands clenched against his knees.
Akiteru and his forces had not returned yet.
Seijiro calculated automatically: distance, supply routes, possible wounded men, and marching speed. It wouldn't be long. Soon, the Gojo banners would appear on the road; soon, his father would walk through the gates and bring answers. And then—
No. Not here. Not in front of her.
"You're quiet again," Atsuhime hummed again, softly. She patted the space beside her. "Come here, dear. Your hair's a mess."
Seijiro blinked out of his own thoughts and returned to the present. He lowered himself beside her once more, cross-legged, with the breeze tugging loose strands of hair at the nape of his neck. He exhaled through his nose, a breath halfway between a sigh and a laugh, and moved closer with weary resignation. He knew the ritual well.
Her hands gathered his hair, gently and carefully. The touch should have felt comforting, a mother tending to her son. Instead, it burned and brought bile to his tongue. She worked slowly, drawing the strands together, smoothing them into a neat high ponytail.
Not the loose one Seijiro usually wore. The precise, high-tailed Akiteru had favored when he was younger.
Seijiro's fists tightened against his knees; he had spent his entire life trying not to become his father. He stared at the tatami while she finished tying the cord.
When she was done, Atsuhime patted his shoulder with satisfaction. "There, there," she said warmly. "Now you look like yourself again."
Seijiro closed his eyes. Yourself. Who the hell was that supposed to be? Still, he smiled. "Thank you," he murmured. Because what else could he say?
The creak of wood at the threshold announced a presence before the voice did. "Excuse the intrusion, Gojo-sama."
Payo entered like a blessing, if blessings carried teacups and looked permanently one breath away from scolding you. Her round face was flushed from the kitchens, hair tucked under a kerchief, and sleeves tied back in a knot that said she had better things to do than look elegant. The faded grey yukata was hitched under an apron and stained at the hem with flour.
Seijiro's eyes softened.
He had kept his promise; he had dragged Payo and the young Shima back to the Gojo estate like contraband he refused to let his father confiscate. He had reinstated Payo as Atsuhime's attendant, and she had taken to the duty with unrestrained joy, as if serving the Okugata-sama again was the only thing that mattered in her life right after Shima. It did not bother her that Atsuhime barely recognized her; it did not seem to register that half the time, Atsuhime did not recognize the room she was in. And Shima, too young to be given any real role, followed Payo in silence, learning what it meant to serve people who lived outside time, people who forgot you, people who remembered you wrong, people who looked straight through you.
Payo crouched to set the tray down between mother and son, careful with the tatami and everything. Then she beamed, wide and warm in the way only women like her could be. "Tea, freshly steeped," she announced, handing a yunomi to Seijiro first. Then she turned, gentler and almost reverent, toward the woman on the futon. "Okugata-sama. Your favorite. Ginger and plum blossom."
Atsuhime accepted it with a small hum of approval. "You're always so thoughtful," she said in a sing-song voice.
Seijiro picked up his yunomi and gave Payo a small nod. "You spoil us," he murmured, watching steam curl up.
Payo returned the nod with pride, maternal, in the way that came from having held him as a newborn decades ago and still seeing the boy inside the man with hollowed eyes. And for a brief moment, the illusion held.
A small domestic scene.
Then, Seijiro added, distracted, "It's hot. Careful, Mother—"
He bit down on the inside of his lip a heartbeat too late for the mistake to be corrected. Atsuhime's fingers froze around her yunomi. Payo's face paled, dread sliding into place; her eyes slid to Seijiro in alarm—don't, don't, don't—but it was already done.
Fool.
He knew what came next. He had made that mistake countless times before, so many times it should have become painless, but it never did.
His mother turned toward him slowly, unnaturally slowly. The yunomi trembled in her hands, as her eyes widened, just slightly at first, then with the slow panic of a dream slipping into nightmare.
"Don't," Seijiro whispered, but it wasn't for her; it was for him.
"Mother...?" Atsuhime echoed, repeating a word she did not trust.
Slowly, Seijiro set his yunomi down without blinking and braced.
"You—" Atsuhime's voice dropped to a horrified whisper. "You're not my son." There it was, the first crack. "I don't have any son."
Seijiro closed his eyes and counted to three. The illusion, as always, had shattered.
"I buried my sons," she said, the words rising too fast, her voice trembling. "Both of them. I saw their graves. I—!"
"Okugata-sama, please," Payo pleaded, reaching out, but it was too late.
"Don't touch me!" Atsuhime flinched away from her like a frightened animal, and then her gaze snapped back to Seijiro. "Trickster," she hissed, and the previous sweetness in her voice was all gone. "Who sent you?"
Next thing, the yunomi flew, and the ceramic struck the side of Seijiro's forehead with a thock. Hot tea splashed over his temple, ran down his cheek and jaw, soaked into the collar of his kosode. The sting bloomed immediately and brightened over his skin.
Seijiro did not flinch, did not lift a hand, did not activate Infinity. He just took it.
Atsuhime's chest rose and fell too fast as panic made her look younger, for a second less an Okugata-sama and more a young woman still trapped in a nightmare she could not wake from. "Where are my children?" she screamed. "Where is my baby?"
Payo gasped, moving quickly, trying to intercept Atsuhime as she began to sob and mutter wildly, hands shaking as if they no longer belonged to her. "Okugata-sama, please. It's Seijiro-sama—your son—he's here, he's safe—"
"Liar!" Atsuhime struck out blindly, knocking the tray aside, and tea pooled on the tatami. A yunomi rolled and shattered. "All of you—liars—They're dead! They're both dead!" Her nails clawed at her own skin, scratching and drawing blood as her voice cracked. "Ghosts. You're all ghosts."
Seijiro stood without a word, one hand braced briefly against his knee as he pushed himself upright. Tea dripped from his hair; he could feel it cooling against his skin. His haori was still folded where he had left it. He picked it up, and the fabric was damp where tea had splashed. "I'm sorry," he murmured.
He did not know who he was apologizing to anymore.
Payo hovered beside him, frantic. "Gojo-sama—"
"I'm fine," Seijiro said too quickly. He wasn't, but that wasn't the point. Payo did not need that on top of everything else. "Focus on her," he added, voice flattening. His words came out trained in the way his father had always demanded. "Make sure she drinks something."
Then he was gone.
The shoji shut behind him with a soft sound, and Seijiro stood in the engawa with his eyes closed, forehead resting against a wooden beam. The tea burned where it clung to his skin, but he barely felt it anymore. Inside, Atsuhime sobbed for children she could not remember. I buried my sons. Both of them.
Her sons were dead. One had died in infancy; the other was standing outside her door, listening to her grieve him and wondering whether she was right.
Seijiro ran a hand through his hair and dislodged the knot she had tied; the cord came loose, and strands fell, wet, clinging to his cheek. His fingers hovered over the red welt on his temple that stung more in spirit than in skin. When he shifted, his shoulder throbbed. Masanari's arrow wound had long since sealed. Payo had taken care of it, but the corrosive, cursed energy had done its job anyway, and when the wind turned cold, the joint ached.
Good.
Pain meant he still had work to do. And work, there was plenty.
The Gojo clan was on the brink; the entire damn clan balanced on the edge of a blade, worsened by his father's war crimes. Save the clan, he reminded himself. Protect Payo. Protect Shima. Protect Atsuhime. Protect Hideyori, and even Rensuke. Clean up your father's mess. Rebuild everything he had burned.
Only then, only once the clan was safe, would Seijiro kneel before Kaoru and beg forgiveness for sins he hadn't committed. Assuming she hadn't already crossed his name from the scroll of the living.
A flicker of movement to his left. He didn't turn when Rensuke's voice came. "You have a cut on the forehead," he observed, eyes on the droplets sliding down Seijiro's temple. "Did you know?"
Seijiro was too tired to laugh, but the absurdity tugged at the corner of his mouth anyway. "Say one more word," he muttered, "and I'll tear out your tongue. Which, by the way, would solve the little problem of your binding vow keeping you too honest with my father."
Silence. Rensuke, wisely, kept his opinions to himself, for once. The shinobi leaned against the opposite beam, arms folded in the lazy set of his shoulders. Payo had stitched him back together after Seijiro's outburst, the one where Seijiro had, justifiably, rearranged a few of his friend's ribs, and most of the bruises had faded.
The betrayal hadn't.
Seijiro still didn't know whether letting him live had been mercy or stupidity, but Rensuke had knelt, bled, and confessed. It counted for something, eventually. Deadpan silence lingered between them. A beat, two. Then—
"Report," Seijiro ordered, adjusting his damp haori against his shoulders.
Rensuke's face shifted into mild concern. "Movement at the gate."
Seijiro's head lifted, his focus narrowing. The wind was shifting, finally. "Which gate?"
Rensuke hesitated. "Main gate," he specified.
Seijiro was already walking down the engawa, letting the cold air bite at the tea on his skin until it dried tacky. "So?" he called over his shoulder, voice light and mocking, because that was how he kept things easy. "Who came knocking first? My esteemed father returning from his glorious campaign of war crimes? Zenin-dono ready to take revenge and my head with it? Or Kamo-dono with another sermon about 'balance among clans'—please tell me it's not Kamo-dono, I might throw myself into the koi pond."
Rensuke followed, passing a hand through his short brown hair and muttering curses under his breath. Then, reluctantly: "It's your father."
Seijiro stopped. He turned, and the seriousness on Rensuke's face twisted something inside him.
"Your father," Rensuke repeated, voice low, "is badly wounded."
On Seijiro's face, the first expression was blank. Then, slowly, the bitterness unfurled at the corner of his mouth. Joy. Pure dangerous joy. "Of course he is," he murmured, unable to stop the hysterical smirk. "As I said, he has no idea what kind of enemy he created."
He just wasn't sure if he meant Kaoru.
.·:·.✧ ✦ ✧.·:·.
The great hall was not as Seijiro remembered it.
Gone was the precision and his father's obsessive symmetry, the perfect wooden floor that caught the golden afternoon, the incense that always burned. Gone, too, was the hush of elders on silky zabuton, muttering strategies in his father's ears.
Instead, there was chaos, and the smell of it.
Stench of blood and burned meat permeated the air, heavy enough that Seijiro almost covered his nose. The floorboards were smeared in clotted trails of red-black, and somewhere deeper in the hall, a man groaned. Outside, in the courtyard, hooves clattered, voices overlapped, and orders were barked too fast. Some men stumbled in on their own legs, while some were carried. He didn't need to see Payo to know she'd spend the entire night and all of tomorrow mending bodies and calming screams. And even then, some of these men would never walk again. Others, he feared, wouldn't even survive the night.
Fifty men of the Gojo forces, between fighters and sorcerers, had made it back to Kyoto.
Seijiro didn't know the exact initial number of his father's campaign, but he knew that even those fifty men were excessive for a village of farmers.
He didn't hurry when he stepped over the threshold with cold indifference. He followed the smear of discarded tissue and blood and the scent, raised one hand to motion Rensuke back. The shinobi obeyed, stopping at the entrance with the smallest hesitation.
Seijiro couldn't blame him; he, too, had to blink twice before his eyes accepted what they were seeing.
Akiteru Gojo—Akiteru, the most calculating mind in jujutsu society—was bleeding into his own reflection like a gutted boar.
He was slumped against a pillar, drenched in his own blood as pale attendants swarmed around him. They moved frantically, with the urgency and uselessness of people trying to stop the wind with their hands. On his chest, on his arms, Akiteru's leather armor had fused into his scorched flesh; they peeled at it in slow strips, flinching every time a piece came away with that awful whisper of torn skin. Then, Akiteru turned, and one of the retainer crawled sideways to puke into the floor. One side of Akiteru's scalp was completely melted and blistered; his silver hair had melted into char, and strips of skin were dangling beside his ear. His torso, where it was not fused in his armor, was a patchwork of burns and oozing wounds, and every fall and rise as he breathed looked like it cost him greatly.
It looked as if he had been cooked inside his own robes multiple times.
Seijiro had no idea how long the journey from Nagoya-go to Kyoto had taken in that condition. Long enough to be humiliating, he hoped; long enough to hurt; long enough to rot his meat still attached to the bones. He let his eyes travel upward to his father's back, and there he paused.
There had always been eighteen. Eighteen phantom limbs that only Seijiro could see clearly with the Six Eyes, Akiteru's cursed technique, a crown of invisible arms that always hovered behind him. Seijiro had counted them as a child out of boredom, watching them coil and flex while the elders spoke of duty and legacy. But now—
Five. Only five remained.
The rest had been ripped from him. Some severed cleanly, others torn from their roots under his skin, leaving jagged wounds that refused to close, bleeding onto the wood and pestering the air with the rot of infection. And now, the hall reeked like a battlefield left too long to fester in the sun.
Seijiro had never seen his father like this. Not weak, because Akiteru didn't do weak, but wounded. Utterly, unignorably wounded. This wasn't the consequence of misjudgment. This was punishment.
It should have made Seijiro feel something, but it didn't. He felt nothing for his father. He stood still, and the only thing he could find in himself was a wave in his chest that was close to satisfaction. He stepped forward at last, ice-blue eyes fixed on the man who had raised him more like a tool than a child.
When he spoke, his voice was clear and painfully formal. "Chichiue."
The word cut the hall in half, and every single retainer froze.
Akiteru stirred sluggishly. His torso twisted, fully revealing the wreckage of his face. One deep blue eye was gone; melted, dissolved, turned into whatever ruined mess was sliding down his face. The other locked onto Seijiro's with disbelief and irritation. For a man who lived five moves ahead, Akiteru looked suddenly like someone the world had finally caught.
"Seijiro." His name wasn't a greeting; it was an accusation. As if Seijiro's presence here, in Kyoto, not Iga, not the front he'd been ordered to collapse, was already an act of disobedience.
Seijiro inclined his head with fake respect as Akiteru yanked his arm away from a servant dressing a wound. The motion made the attendant flinch. Even now, even now, he tried to look in control, tried to play great lord of the board despite missing most of his pieces.
"Seijiro," he rasped again with blood in his mouth. "I remember giving you orders. You were to collapse the enemy defensive line at Iga. I gave that order myself—"
Seijiro gave a mild shrug. "Your strategy collapsed the moment you marched on Nagoya-go."
"The front—"
"—no longer mattered," Seijiro snapped in with finality. "Not after you decided to make a spectacle of it. Your most recent actions have shifted the entire board. The Hattori seem to be holding their breath; the Kamo are watching and weighing their odds; half the Maeda had sided with Tokugawa Ieyasu. You've done it, Chichiue, you've started a war." He let his eyes slide deliberately over Akiteru's ruined body, and the corner of his mouth lifted. "And looking at you now, I'd say it was for the best I returned to Kyoto."
Akiterur's veins in his neck strained as another strip of fused armor was peeled from his ribs, and his breath hitched; blood spattered the floor when he coughed. "It wasn't supposed to—" he choked. "—there weren't supposed to be sorcerers of that caliber there. They were all transferred to Edo, and Zenin-dono was absent; they were supposed to be—"
"Old men," Seijiro finished, voice turning colder. "Women. Children. You set them on fire."
"It was necessary," he hissed. "They would have attacked us first with that weapon, sooner or later, and you think they would have stopped at the fighters, then? We had to cut their roots before they could multiply more."
Seijiro hummed, as if considering that as he strolled in a slow arc around the hall. "Who did it, then?" he asked lightly. "The samurai who always follows Zenin-dono? The young heir? Or perhaps…" He let the words dangle as bait.
Akiteru took it, jaw locked in pain and pride. "Lightning," he spat. "A boy—no, not human. A demon. I didn't even see him before he struck. He—"
"So. Hajime," Seijiro murmured.
He didn't look back at his father. Instead, he drifted toward the far wall, where a core of cursed energy hummed dormant under cloth and containment talismans. He'd felt it the moment he entered.
The Mitsuboshi no Yari. No, Hiten.
So his father had managed to retrieve it.
Seijiro's hand hovered over the wrapped shaft without touching; he let his Six Eyes drink in the ripple of cursed energy beneath the surface, echoing in his bones. He could only imagine what had been done—who had been destroyed—so that Akiteru could pry this from the hands of the Zenin.
He could almost see it: Nagoya-go in flames, smoke choking every courtyard, people trying to run and finding the gates already fallen, bodies stacked, burned, erased into ash. How many innocents had died for that spear? How many more would still die for it?
Behind him, Akiteru stiffened. "You knew," he snapped hoarsely, raising his voice despite the injuries. "You knew that lightning monster was there. You should have shared that intel, just as you should have shared the presence of Zenin-dono the moment he appeared on the front."
The attendants flinched as the tone cracked through the main hall. One of them actually dropped the bandage he'd been holding, while the others hesitated, unsure whether to kneel lower before the clan head or simply disappear.
"I always knew you were soft. Impulsive. But I never thought you'd betray your own clan by withholding strategically vital information."
There it was: the accusation. Something in his father's plan had gone terribly wrong, and as always, the blame was delivered at Seijiro's feet.
Seijiro didn't even bother to look over his shoulder. "Well," he said casually, slipping a hand under the cloth and drawing the spear free, "can you blame me, Chichiue? I seem to recall being kept in the dark about quite a few details of this plan."
Akiteru's rage simmered behind him, but Seijiro ignored it. His attention remained on Hiten, on the way it hummed under his palm just as he remembered. He spun the spear once, casually, its tip slicing the air with an audible shhhhht. The cursed energy clinging to it drifted like smoke; the same weapon he'd held months ago beside Kaoru, in a corner of the Zenin stronghold, now probably reduced to ash and ruin. That version of the world was gone. Kaoru's voice; her hand brushing his; Harunobu's warning; Tatsuhiro's innocence; Hajime's feral laughter; and—
"And what of them?" Seijiro asked, feigning disinterest, as he kept playing with the spear as if it were a toy. "The lightning boy who tore you apart. The samurai. The heir. What of them?"
Akiteru grunted, massaging his temple where melted flesh split further under the pressure. His blood oozed sluggishly down the side of his head, but he seemed numb to it even as the scent of infection was getting stronger by the second. "I escaped the lightning demon by a breath," he muttered. "Zenin-dono's heir was badly wounded. If the fire didn't take him, the blood loss will. That damn samurai got in the way till the very last."
Seijiro's fingers went still on the spear's shaft as he turned slowly. "You killed the samurai?"
Silence, and that was confirmation enough.
So Harunobu is dead.
A single, treacherous flash of his mind brought Kaoru's face to his eyes, so vivid and so painfully real it felt like being pierced. Seijiro forced it down, drowned it in a bitter, fragile exhale.
"I see," he said, softly. He walked back toward his father, boots soundless over blood-slick wood, and a calculated serenity to his steps. He stopped just short of him. "Everyone out," he ordered, without raising his voice, eyes never leaving the wreck of a man before him. "I only need a moment," he clarified. "To speak with my father. Alone."
His father raised his head with effort, his one remaining eye narrowing. The retainers attending to him froze, uncertain; one looked to Seijiro, the other to Akiteru. Seijiro was not head of the clan, but even fools could see which way the wind was turning. Akiteru was dying in a pool of his own blood, and Seijiro didn't need the title to hold power. The weight of inevitability tilted, and with one more breath, the hall emptied. All the attendants rushed quietly toward the courtyard.
All but one.
Rensuke hadn't moved from the entrance, gaze pinned on Seijiro. He didn't speak, didn't protest, but Seijiro could feel it. He didn't need to say it: this isn't by far what we talked about.
Seijiro offered him a cold smile, gesturing with a tilt of his head. "I won't take long."
Rensuke looked at Akiteru, then at Seijiro again; he didn't care for Akiteru, never really had, but he was trying, in his own tired, resigned way, to keep Seijiro alive, and what Seijiro was about to do was very far from the alive version of him Rensuke had envisioned.
Still. If he was going to clean up this mess, Seijiro had to become worse than the man who made it.
After a long moment, the shinobi exhaled through his nose and slipped away; the door slid shut behind him, and the silence that followed was absolute.
Akiteru, oblivious—or perhaps willfully ignorant of the shift in tone—continued giving him orders as if nothing had changed. Maybe the pain dulled his perception, or maybe he still thought he had control. The patriarch to the very end. It was admirable.
"Seijiro," he rasped. "You understand what must be done. The spear is unstable. You'll need to stabilize it. We must bring forth a barrier, something to protect Kyoto and Fushimi. Use the Six Eyes to regulate its output. I expect you to—"
"Oh, rest assured, Chichiue," Seijiro interrupted, smiling and spinning the spear once more in his hands, behind his back, and over his head in a fluid motion. "I'll take care of everything."
Akiteru exhaled as if the world had finally returned to its proper order. He tried to push himself upright on one knee, then the other, grunting against pain. Blood trailed freely down his ribs. "Enough," he muttered. "I must see Atsuhime."
Seijiro blinked, and with that, his calm fractured. Even now, even after Nagoya-go, even with blood on his hands so thick it had become a second skin, all he cared about was seeing the one fragile thing he still called love. The woman he had loved and broken.
How predictable; how obscene.
Too bad.
Seijiro stepped in front of him, still smiling. "No."
Akiteru's remaining eye narrowed. "What?"
"Mother had an episode," Seijiro said softly. "She required rest."
His father's breath hitched, anger flaring. "Move."
Seijiro didn't move. There was a certain cruel delight about denying him that final solace, an echo of every time Akiteru had denied him a kindness growing up. "She won't be seeing anyone," Seijiro added, and this time there was no warmth in his smile. "Especially not you."
Akiteru stared at him with slow dawning comprehension sliding over his face like sickness. "Seijiro—"
"In case you're confused," Seijiro added, mildly, "this is the part where I deny you something you want."
Akiteru's mouth opened to protest, but he never got the words out. Because Seijiro moved first. In a single movement—too fast for a dying old man to follow—Seijiro moved behind him. A blur of the spear and three of the remaining phantom limbs on Akiteru's back were severed mid-motion, sliced through without resistance by Hiten's nullifying trait. And Seijiro, with his Six Eyes, had seen exactly where to strike.
The severed limbs spasmed, bleeding anew onto the wooden floor, and the sound Akiteru produced wasn't dignified, and it wasn't even articulate. He collapsed forward, trying to scramble away on hands slick with his own blood, slipping and leaving streaks on the floor like a red brushstroke.
Seijiro stood still and watched his father writhe, scrambling backward on all fours.
He didn't chase yet. He let his father struggle for a few breaths, savoring the panic on that face. He had wanted this man dead since he was old enough to understand what Akiteru had done to him and to his mother. He had wanted it so badly that he had thought more than once to do so himself. He had also wanted, once, not to be here at all. Seijiro had never wanted the Clan Head title, never wanted the bloodline, never wanted the damn Gojo name. He had spent his whole life running in the opposite direction. Laughing too much, dressing wrong, disrespecting the ceremony. Refusal was the only freedom he'd been allowed.
Every move he made had been a rejection of this moment. And yet here he was, because someone had to be.
Was it justice? No. Justice was what people told themselves to sleep at night. This was an overdue correction.
As blood foamed at the corners of Akiteru's mouth, Seijiro crouched in front of him, resting Hiten across his knees. He tilted his head and looked his father in the eye. There was fear there now. Finally, the great Akiteru Gojo had grasped what kind of son he had raised.
Akiteru tried anyway; two phantom limbs remained, lunging toward Seijiro in a last desperate attempt but Seijiro Blue-blinked and severed them both with a lazy spin of the spear. Akiteru sagged, his shoulders trembled as he had no limbs left, nothing to hide behind. He turned his head just enough to look at Seijiro, and he saw his son's expression. A smile; the same small curve Seijiro had worn when he handed Takahiro Zenin his death.
How ironic.
"Don't tell me you forgot, Chichiue," Seijiro said softly as he caught a fistful of Akiteru's blood-soaked hair and wrenched his head back, exposing the line of his throat.
Akiteru wheezed something, a plea, a curse, a name. Seijiro didn't care which. Outside, distant voices rose, and Seijiro could hear commotion in the inner courtyard. Shouting, orders, footsteps. Something was happening outside, maybe another storm was approaching, but Seijiro didn't look away and kept his grip steady.
He lifted Hiten until steel kissed skin at his father's throat.
"I warned you, remember? Test my patience again—" he murmured over a slicing sound too soft, almost disappointingly so, "—and I will personally slit your throat."